Inspired by the Netflix contest, Nicholas Gruen and Anthony Goldbloom have created Kaggle, a site where would-be predictors go head-to-head to build a model that best forecasts the future. You can read more about it at Club Troppo, and at the Kaggle site.

Their first competition is to build a model that predicts the results of Eurovision 2010. Given the large idiosyncratic component in this kind of contest, I’m not sure how well suited it is to prediction models (the model that best predicts the 2010 result is unlikely to be the model that best predicts the winners for 2010-2019). But it’s a clever way of getting the Kaggle idea out there quickly.

Statisticians of the world, unite. You have nothing to lose but your residuals.